An article discussed about Linux and Hwang Woo-Suk. The title of the article catches my attention. How Hwang and Linux relate to each others? For those who haven’t heard about Hwang’s story, just go to this link. For your information, Linux is an open source OS contributed by developers all over world. I still remember a few words from a Microsoft speaker who came to my company for a debate entitled “Open Source: Yes or No” He said that “Open Source’s developers are irresponsible on the copyright issues. They can do whatever they want without any rules and regulations imposed on them”. Until now, I am not too convinced with his words. One thing that I agree with him is that Microsoft is creating job opportunity to the peoples. According to the article, Hwang’s downfall was mainly contributed by young scientists who frequently visited the web-site. They started to question the validity of Hwang’s photo. Some of them even proved how the photo is cooked. Same as what "Y" said to me, Jinho is good in using the PhotoShop to manipulate the photo! Anyway, I haven’t seen the photo before. I agreed that the only way to improve your research results is to make it publicly accessable. Same as giving out the source code in Linux, allow other to modify, enhance and make it better. However, this is not the case in current research practice in engineering. You have to pay for accessing the Journal. Even to publish your result, you have to pay for it. My roommate once asked me why you need to pay for attending the conference and this is not applicable to those who studied social science like me! Anyway, I still could not believe the reviewers of the so called prestigious journal could not pinpoint the faked photo. At last, we should blame the reviewers as well.
More discussion on the internet culture in this article…..
2 comments:
I think some of the people who agree to be reviewers are actually too busy to do a good job reviewing or don't want to spend the extra-time fulfilling their responsibilities. Understanding 1 scientific paper is very difficult even for someone in the same field because the research is so specific and everything is so specialised. There are also other factors like the reputation of the author and fear of making a mistake that many reviewers take into consideration. However, I agree that in Hwang's case the reviewers erred by not looking carefully at the pictures.
One thing I'm sure of though is that if the reviewer was my Prof, he wouldn't have missed the pics because he makes us understand and explain each and every detail in every picture of scientific papers.
Another thing that I couldn't understand is how the co-author can miss it as well. Since this is a scientific breakthrough, he should be more responsible and not just simply pull out his name after the mess.
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